


What's Dead Should Stay Dead

by MonPetitTresor



Series: Family Don't End With Blood [3]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Supernatural
Genre: Dean's Deal, Demon Deals, Scared Sam, So is JARVIS, Tony Stark Is a Good Bro, Tony's POV
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-12
Updated: 2017-06-12
Packaged: 2018-11-13 09:07:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11181522
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MonPetitTresor/pseuds/MonPetitTresor
Summary: Tony gets a phone call, and everything changes.





	What's Dead Should Stay Dead

**Author's Note:**

> I’ve had some questions about timelines, so let me go ahead and clarify. This is all happening in the first season of Supernatural, which is 2005/2006, so Tony isn't Iron Man yet. Tony doesn’t return from the deserts of Afghanistan until 2008, right after Dean goes to Hell and during Sam’s 4 months alone. Hope that clears things up for you guys!

When Tony first met a young Sam Winchester, he hadn’t had any idea just how much that kid would come to mean to him, or how big a role they’d play in one another’s lives. For a long time Tony had lived in the mindset of ‘don’t get attached’. It was just safer that way. If you didn’t get attached there was less of a chance that people could hurt you. Too many people had had the opportunity to do that to him. Now, the only people he let close were Obie and Rhodey. And now Sam.

At first, talking with Sam had simply been a way to find out more about this world that apparently existed that almost no one knew about. Finding out that the supernatural was _real_ was a hell of a thing. Tony had thousands of questions and Sam didn’t seem to have any issue answering them. Not only that, he didn’t seem to have any issue teaching Tony what he needed to know to keep himself safe. When he came out for the summer, he made sure Tony’s house was as safe as he could possibly make it.

Tony told himself that was the reason he was keeping the kid around and talking to him so much. Because he wanted to pick his brain. It had nothing to do with the fact that he felt sorry for the kid.

It was just – he couldn’t get out of his head the image of this scrawny kid dressed in clothes that didn’t fit quite right, that had the look of being hand-me-downs or something bought second hand, sitting in Tony’s hotel room and calmly talking about a childhood that was more horrifying than Tony had thought was possible, acting all the while like it was normal. He couldn’t erase the memory of the ache in Sam’s eyes when he’d looked down at his drink as he told Tony about his father telling him not to come back just because he wanted to go get an education and a brother who hadn’t wanted to get in the middle, who had been heartbroken and angry at a brother who was ‘abandoning’ him.

Of course, none of that had any bearing on him inviting out for the summer. Of course not. He just needed someone to make sure his security was actually _safe_.

By the time summer was over not even Tony believed that lie anymore.

Sam was startlingly open considering the secretive life he’d been forced to lead. When Tony commented on it, the kid had laughed at him. “You already know my biggest secret.” He’d pointed out. “Besides, it’s not like you haven’t already had JARVIS look me up.”

True. He’d already had JARVIS dig up everything he could about Sam Winchester. What he found was… well, small, and what little was there was sad. There was all the information about his mother, of course, plus various CPS files here and there from different places throughout the country. Once Sam told him a few of their family aliases, he was able to gather in more information as well. The picture it painted wasn’t a pretty one.

Over that summer Tony got to know a lot about who Sam Winchester was. By the time the kid went back, Tony knew he was screwed. There was no way he could ignore the fact that something about this kid called out to him. Sam was around thirteen years younger than him, yet he’d seen and done more in his life than most people Tony knew. He had the body of a kid, the eyes of an old war veteran, and yet somehow also had this aura of innocence and hope to him that was exceedingly rare. He was just – he was _good_. That kind of goodness, it was something that Tony rarely saw, especially in the world he lived in, and he couldn’t help feeling like he needed to protect that.

They only grew closer with time. They’d known one another for a year the first time that Tony had jokingly called Sam his little brother, though it wasn’t the first time he’d thought it. When Sam had just laughed at him and shaken his head, jokingly saying “Great, just what I need, _another_ overprotective big brother” it’d made Tony grin.

He found that he didn’t really have to put on a mask when he spent time with Sam. He was free to just be himself. No matter what side of himself he showed, Sam never ran from it. He’d tell Tony when he thought he was being an idiot, and he could snark back with the best of them, but he was also understanding and kind and somehow managed to get Tony to talk about things he’d sworn never to talk to anyone about.

By the time big brother Dean came back into the picture, and Jess died, Sam as unofficially Tony’s family.

They kept their friendship a secret. There were too many reasons to keep quiet about it. A hunter who needed to periodically break the law, even impersonate officers sometimes, it wouldn’t do them any good to have their face plastered in the tabloids like what happened to anyone that got close to Tony. Also, Sam admitted when he was pretty plastered the one night – the best way, Tony found, to get him to admit to anything, and to also get him to loosen up though he could easily turn into a tearful, maudlin drunk – that Dean likely wouldn’t take well to Sam being this close to someone else. As Sam hit the road with him again, various things in their texts or video chats made it clear that Dean had a tendency to not like to share. It became even clearer after the case where an old college friend called Sam back for some help with a shapeshifter. Sam told Tony about it afterwards, including just how upset Dean had been that Sam wasn’t cutting people out of his life.

So they kept their friendship quiet. No one knew that the two even knew one another, let alone how close they were.

Which meant that there was no one that knew to call him when Sam died.

It wasn’t until after – after Sam was kidnapped, after he was _stabbed in the back_ , after Dean made his demon deal to save Sam’s life – that Tony found out what happened. He was working in his lab when the call came in from Sam. Usually, he ignored most any call, or JARVIS blocked them for him, but he wasn’t the only one in the house with a soft spot for the Winchester kid. “Sir,” JARVIS said, turning down the music so that his voice was easier to hear. “You have an incoming call from Sam.”

The fact that JARVIS actually called the kid ‘Sam’ and not ‘Mr. Winchester’ was something that had taken a bit of work on Sam’s part during his stays here. He’d gotten rather close with JARVIS, chatting with him frequently and never seeming to feel the need to treat him like anything other than a person. He did the same with Dum-E, too, which only raised him up in both JARVIS and Tony’s books.

Tony looked up from the project he was working on and grinned. “Patch him through, J.”

A second later an image opened up in a hologram to Tony’s right. One look at Sam’s face had Tony’s smile wiping away. “What’s wrong?” There were lines on Sam’s face that only came out when he was stressed, and he looked like he’d aged decades in just the week since they’d last spoken. What the hell was going on? What _happened_?

What Sam started with was nothing like what Tony expected. “Azazel’s dead.”

Surprise widened Tony’s eyes. He knew the name of the demon that had killed Mary and Jess. As soon as Sam had found out, he’d told him, though he hadn’t told him much else. Much to Tony’s continued annoyance, Sam didn’t call on him or JARVIS for help with their cases, claiming that he didn’t want to call attention to him, that Tony wasn’t ‘in the life’ and Sam didn’t want to drag him there, plus some other bullshit about safety for Tony and blah, blah, blah. He was using some other genius he apparently knew to try and track things. It irritated the hell out of Tony, but he couldn’t exactly make Sam change his mind. “So why do you look like your world ended? shouldn’t you be, y’know – happy?”

Sam let out a raspy laugh that held no real hints of humor to it. It was painful to listen to. “You’d think.” Pausing, he lifted his hand and rubbed at his forehead, a sure sign of a headache. Usually the kind he got after reading for too long. Stupid kid. He needed to take breaks! Or even pass some off to that brother of his. From what Tony gathered – Sam wasn’t all that willing to talk about his brother, once he’d caught on to the fact that Tony really wasn’t too impressed with the guy on some things – it wasn’t uncommon for Sam to sit around and research while Dean went to the bar and hustled them some cash and chased some tail.

He watched as Sam sat back in his seat. The image showed two beds behind him, one of them with a few duffle bags on it. Likely Sam had his laptop sitting on the table. Though Tony had done a few upgrades on the thing for him, it was still an older one, not a fancy one like he’d wanted to give. It worked for their video calls, though. “So, um, I need to tell you a few things, and I need you not to shout at me.” Sam said slowly.

Well that didn’t sound good. Tony tapped his screwdriver on the countertop and tried to grin. “Shout? Me? I don’t shout. Do I shout, JARVIS?”

“Frequently, Sir.” JARVIS said, the little tattletale. “Often after you feel that young Sam has done something you deem foolish.” Hidden in there was the sarcastic tone that made it clear how amusing JARVIS found it that Tony would shout at anyone for doing ‘foolish’ things. Snarky little AI. Bless him.

“Fine, so I shout sometimes. But maybe you shouldn’t do such stupid stuff and I wouldn’t have to do it, huh?”

Rolling his eyes, Sam shook his head. Some of the stress lines had vanished off his face, though – Tony counted that as a win.

Then it was all lost and he could only sit there and stare as Sam told him what had been happening. He told Tony about being taken and transported to this strange town where he and the other ‘special kids’ were all trapped in some sort of Celebrity Death Match from Hell – literally – and how Ava had been there. Ava, the girl that Sam had been looking for lately. The one he’d even asked JARVIS to help him look for, showing just how desperate he really was. The one who had apparently been there for a while, and who tried to kill them all.

Then he told Tony about fighting, about trying to get free, about how it got down just to two of them. Him and Jake. Then, he froze. Licking his lips, Sam dropped his gaze down to his hands, and Tony faintly caught sight of him twisting his fingers. Whatever was going to come next was bad. It was going to be really bad.

He had no idea just how true that was.

“I uh, I was stupid, and I made a mistake.” Sam said slowly, achingly. “I turned my back on Jake, thinking that I was safe, that we’d called a truce or whatever. And he… he stabbed me. In the back.”

Son of a bitch! Tony’s screwdriver dropped with a loud clang and he shot forward, eyes running quickly over the image of Sam, trying to see anything he could. “Are you okay?”

“I died.” The way Sam said that, so simple, so painful, ripped at Tony’s guts almost as much as the idea that _Sam had died_. But, if he’d died, then how…? “Dean, uh. He made a deal.” Here, Sam paused, squeezing his eyes shut, and his voice cracked a bit. “He went to the crossroads and he made a freaking deal, Tone. And they gave him a _year_. A goddamn year!”

Oh _fuck_. Tony’s eyebrows shot up and he knew he looked stunned. Through this whole quest for Azazel, Tony had learned a lot about demons. He even had new wards and some devil’s traps in his home, now. He’d also learned plenty about the crossroads after Sam had a case dealing with hellhounds. He knew that Sam and Dean were both convinced John had made a deal for Dean’s life – that this was how Dean was alive and John wasn’t. Tony had even snuck away at one point to visit Sam after his father’s death and he knew just how bad it had torn Sam up, and he’d heard how bad it’d torn up Dean to realize that. To know that his father was dead so he could live.

And – Dean had done the same thing? He’d done it, made a deal for his life, for Sam? On one hand, Tony felt bad for Sam, unable to even imagine living with that kind of guilt. On the other hand, he couldn’t exactly be mad at Dean for doing this, because it meant that Sam was _alive_.

“He’s not even sorry about it!” Sam was raging on the screen. His hands were in his hair, tugging on it, and his eyes looked so damn haunted. “All his stupid speeches about how what’s dead should stay dead and all that _bullshit_ , and then he goes and does this? I can’t… how could he think I’d be okay with it? That I’d be okay with my brother going to _Hell_ just so I can live?”

“He loves you.” It wasn’t much of an excuse, but it was a bit of an explanation. Everything that Tony knew about Dean Winchester said that he loved his brother more than anything else. “I know it doesn’t make it okay, but it sounds to me like he’s just doing the only thing he knows how to do, Big Man. Take care of you.”

Sam’s face was tortured. “Not like this! I didn’t want this!”

There was nothing that Tony could say to that. He didn’t know how to help here. Words – those were never really his area, not when it was important like this. Put him in front of the board or a camera, sure, he could bullshit his way through all of it. But when it was for someone important, when it mattered, he was always so afraid of saying the wrong thing and messing it up. Emotions weren’t easy for him. People weren’t easy. He much preferred robots. So, instead of trying to offer false comfort, he offered the only thing he could “What can I do?”

For the first time ever, Sam took him up on his offer. “Can you… can you guys try to look into any way to break a crossroads deal? I’m going to be researching and I’ll look through the lore books at Bobby’s place, but, I don’t know, maybe you guys might find something I do?”

“It would be my pleasure.” JARVIS answered for himself.

Tony nodded his head. “Yeah, you got me, too. I’ll do what I can. Not sure what I’ll find that you don’t – I don’t exactly have lore books. But we’ll find something.” Even if they had to put in a few searches for some lore books. Tony wasn’t afraid to fly somewhere to go and get some, either. If there was information out there to be found, he and JARVIS would find it.

It took another ten minutes of planning and talking before Sam hung up the phone. By the time they were done, the kid had looked less angry, but so much more exhausted.

“Start making plans, J.” Tony said, eyes still on the place where Sam’s image had been moments before. “Just in case, I want to be ready the instant everything goes down. I don’t care if I have to call in Rhodey and Happy or even Pepper. If we don’t find a way to break this thing and Dean dies, we’re kidnapping Sam and bringing him here to hold him hostage.” Otherwise, Tony had a bad feeling about what might happen. The relationship between the two brothers was far more codependent than was healthy, and Tony had no idea what might happen if Sam was left to flounder without Dean or someone there to ground him.

“As you wish, Sir. I’ll make sure a room is ready for him.”

“In the meantime, let’s see what we can find on demon deals.”

They’d do everything they could to help Sam through the next year. If there was a way to save Dean, they were going to find it. If there wasn’t, well, he was going to be prepared for that, too. He knew what loss could do to a person. He wasn’t going to let it destroy Sam.

Little did he know how doomed his plans were.


End file.
